Climate change news

At the nicely named web site www.breadandbutterscience.com there is a pdf of over 500 pages of text with the title, 'A chronological history of early weather events' by James Marusek (2010) as a counter to AGW hype concerning modern weather extremes - which are supposed to be coming thick and fast as a result of rising C02 levels. This composition shows that such a point of view is really rather juvenile and not worth commenting on to be truthful.

At http://judithcurry.com/2011/07/16/manufacturing-consensus/ there is a post with hundreds of comments on the AGW consensus. Judith Curry is a published climate scientist whose aim is to open a dialogue with sceptics, in an attempt to bridge the gulf. It seems one of Peter Warlow's villains was responsible. Worth reading.

Its beginning to look like the implosion by the press as a result of the News of the World 'dodgy practises' might in the end shed a shaft of light into the politics of Climategate. A certain individual, a spinmeister by trade, implicated in the affair, seems not to just have been employed by the police in the battle to counter terrorism but was also hired by the University of East Anglia in the wake of the Climategate email leak. Basically, his role was as a PR advisor, deflecting the blogosphere that had gone ballistic after the release of those emails.

It seems that volcanic aerosols may be under-estimated when it comes to global temperatures. Research in France has just been published by PNAS (July 2011) (see http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/07/11/new-study-suggests-that-the-volcan... ). What caught my attention in this post is the possibility that aerosols may play a role in the cool weather of the Little Ice Age (but unsaid).

It seems we have two climate scientists with the monicker of Michael Mann (but with different middle names). This emerged with the publication of a paper where the 'other' Michael Mann was a co-author of the Kaufmann et al release that has admitted, for the first time, that global surface temperatures did not rise between 1998 and 2008 (ignoring the last couple of years) (see http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/07/04/a-peer-reviewed-admission-that-glo... ).

As Willie Soon and Sally Baliunas have again come in for some high octane criticism from the doomsaying community as alarmist quarters scratch around waving their arms in all directions looking for conservatives under their beds - and for some reason to explain why their once unassailable position is repeatedly being challenged. The accusation against Soon and Baliunas is that they were partly funded by Big Oil - via their university.

At www.physorg.com/print228124344.html .... ideas to combat the rise in levels of co2 in the atmosphere and in the oceans are beginning to feature some Dr Strangelove kind of ideas - and one of them is adding iron filings to the oceans. The threat of global warming, they think, is good reason to tinker with ecological systems - in the air we breathe and the water that feeds us with its bounty. Luckily, a few other scientists are getting worried something crazy will be set in motion, and a bit of research into the oceans is in order.